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- Hacker News
Revenge is best when served cold!> “a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.”Take this to the extreme limit: Thousands of volunteers put anti-Flock cameras on their property and their vehicles. Real time data on police cars is uploaded to the cloud. You can virtually track any cruiser on a Google Maps-like app. Next, high resolution photos are snapped of the drivers and try to ID the officer from public photos published by the very same police department. Again: As real time as possible. For full reverse police state effect: Monitor police radios using LLMs. All police stops/action immediately triggers a drone flight with 4K video of the scene. Auto request body cam footage from the stop using FOIA data requests. This would be terrifying for the police and potentially perfectly legal in the US.
- I called it a few days ago[1][2]:
> Balance of power. Not only can the cops watch you - you can watch them.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995885
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995811
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49995932
[2] As did many others, of course.
by BeetleB - I'm not familiar with privacy and filming laws in canada, but if the cops just came there and chatted with him without any arrests, warnings, citations, detainment, etc, then it isn't really different from any other random citizen knocking on your door and asking about your security camera.
- Alright HN, here’s your challenge: build an open source Flock but for cops and politicians.
Build plugins for common doorbell or surveillance systems consumers use - Ring, Ubiquiti, Frigate, whatever - and have it look for official vehicles (cops, diplomat plates, government plates, etc). When detected, publish the data to an open database searchable by the general public that includes location, time, date, direction of travel, make, model, and occupants of vehicle.
After all, if this data is really not protected by privacy laws as the cops/Flock/Axon/etc claim, then obviously it’s in our best interest to keep such a database ourselves to track those who track us. We may not have the right of way or easements or budgets to build out a network like these corporate spooks, but an open community database could cover a wide swath pretty quickly.
Surely someone out there has the time and expertise willing to take the heat for such a project.
by stego-tech - Someone should build OpenFlock which only tracks and makes public movement of city council members who voted for Flock cameras in their city. For empathy.by tintor
- Why is nothing being done about this? This is 1984 we were laughing about. USA laughed at China when they did the same, but when USA is doing the same people are not outraged shooting those down, painting over them. Am I missing something?
- I can see some nuance to this one. Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average. Tracking cops and then publishing that information is not exactly the same as turning Flock back on the Flockers.
I think the best solution is to just say nobody can do this, including the government. Or that if we allow things like Flock to exist, then we'd need actual legislation that tightens considerably how available the data is to be searched, and what approvals are necessary to access it.
The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.
by rootusrootus - Flock and ALPR usage is solved in USA if every state adopts New Hampshire's law:
* Illegal to collect every plate for later analysis
* Must delete "non hit" plate images within 3 minutes
* Strict forbidden to upload "non hit" camera imagery off the device
I would add that it should also require a warrant to access the ALPR data, but it's a great start.
https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XXI/261/261-75-b.htm?utm_source=c...
by petcat